WHAT IS HOLOCAUST INVERSION?
Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that asserts that the Holocaust is either a myth, an exaggeration, or a fabrication.
Holocaust denial takes many forms. Sometimes it’s outright denial that the Holocaust happened. Usually, however, it’s a distortion of established facts about the Holocaust. This is also known as Holocaust revisionism or soft Holocaust denial.
Soft Holocaust denial is an insidious form of Holocaust denial. Instead of outright denying the existence of the Holocaust, soft Holocaust denial minimizes it. An extremely insidious and prevalent form of Holocaust denial, revisionism, and soft Holocaust denial is known as Holocaust inversion.
Holocaust inversion is a rhetorical tool used to portray Jews as morally equivalent — or worse — than Nazis. It’s often employed in discussions about Israel-Palestine and is frequently used by anti-Zionists. Holocaust inversion is a form of Holocaust revisionism, and, as such, is inherently a form of Holocaust denial.
Since the earliest instances of Holocaust inversion, antisemites have made the implication that Jews did not “learn our lesson” from the Holocaust. This, of course, is a repugnant assertion. The Holocaust was an industrial genocide on a never-before-seen mass scale that eradicated nearly 70% of Europe’s Jewry in the span of less than six years. It was not a “lesson” for us to learn. To frame the Holocaust as a moral lesson for Jews is antisemitic, and the implication that we learned the “wrong lesson” is even worse, as this gives an opening to the repugnant line of thinking that perhaps it would’ve been better if the Jews had not survived at all. Like so...
A BRIEF HISTORY
It’s important to understand that Holocaust inversion actually predates the establishment of the State of Israel, the 1947-1949 Palestine Civil War and Israeli War of Independence, and the Nakba.
Holocaust inversion has its roots in the British Foreign Office during the period of the British Mandate of Palestine. In March of 1945 — about two months before the Nazis even surrendered — the High Commissioner of Palestine, Lord Gort, told the Colonial Secretary in London that “the establishment of any Jewish State in Palestine…will almost inevitably mean the rebirth of National Socialism [i.e. Nazism] in some guise.”
Sir John Bagot Glubb, who later became the British Commander of the Jordanian Arab Legion during the 1948 war, wrote in a 1946 memorandum to the British government that the “new Jews” (i.e. Jewish refugees) had copied Nazi techniques and adopted Hitler’s master race theory. Unsurprisingly, Glubb was a virulent antisemite who considered Jews “unlikeable, aggressive, stiff-necked, vengeful, and imbued with the idea of [being] a superior race.”
Other British officials that engaged in Holocaust inversion included Lord Altrincham, who stated that Zionist youth groups were “a copy of the Hitler Youth,” and Sir Harold MacMichael and Sir Edward Grigg, both of whom equated Zionism with Nazism even while Jews were being slaughtered by the millions in Europe.
Following the end of the war, renowned British historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee disseminated Holocaust inversion to a wide audience, claiming in “A Study of History” that the Zionists in Palestine were “disciples of the Nazis” but were much worse than “their Nazi teachers.”
The Soviet Union had begun distorting the history and the facts of the Holocaust before the war was even won. The Soviet propaganda machine never acknowledged the specifically antisemitic nature of the Holocaust, and instead, depicted all Soviets (as well as communists) as the main victims of the Nazis. This is important to note because, by stripping Jews of the history of our oppression, the Soviets could then easily characterize Jews as Nazis.
In the 1970s alone, hundreds of books and articles equating Zionism to Nazism were published in the Soviet Union and were later translated into Arabic, as well as numerous other languages. In 1985, the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public published a propagandist brochure known as the “Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism,” which claimed that there was irrefutable proof that the Zionists not only had collaborated with the Nazis, but were also responsible for the genocide of Jews, Slavs, and others in Europe. When Israel captured and tried Adolf Eichmann in the 1960s, the Soviets painted the Israel-West Germany relationship as “evidence” that the Zionists had colluded with the Nazis. Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda in the Arab world was so pervasive that it even influenced the dissertation of current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, titled “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism.” According to Abbas, Israel captured Eichmann “to prevent the ‘sacred secrets’ of this [Zionist-Nazi] collaboration from becoming public.”
There are few things I find as despicable as equating October 7 to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was a last-ditch effort to resist the Nazi liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto — that is, the deportation of all of Warsaw’s Jews to extermination camps to be gassed or worked to death. Palestinians in Gaza were not being deported anywhere on October 6, nor were they at risk of extermination.
The Jewish partisans in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising did not target civilians, German or otherwise. According to German records, the only German casualties in 29 days of fighting during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were 17 Nazi soldiers. On the other hand, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and “civilian” perpetrators of October 7 slaughtered nearly 800 civilians, including the elderly and children, over a period of about 12 hours, in addition to some 400 security forces. The partisans in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising did not torture, mutilate, decapitate, or rape anyone. On the other hand, 80% of the victims of October 7 showed signs of torture, including burning alive, decapitation, mutilation, and rape. The Jewish partisans kidnapped no one; the perpetrators of October 7 kidnapped over 250 people, including civilians.
The conditions in pre — and post — October 7 Gaza were not in any way comparable to those of the Warsaw Ghetto. In the Warsaw Ghetto, half a million Jews were crowded in a space of 1.3 square miles (yes, a little over a mile squared). While Gaza is certainly densely populated, it is 141 square miles, with a population of about 2 million. In the Warsaw Ghetto, the Nazis allowed no more than 180 calories daily per prisoner. In pre-October 7 Gaza, the average diet was 2,300 calories a day. Today, the amount of food aid entering the Strip accounts for 3,163 calories per day per person, though it’s evident Hamas and UNRWA are not distributing it fairly. No aid trucks ever went into the Warsaw Ghetto.
Jews were crammed into the Warsaw Ghetto because they were Jews and for no other reason. The Egyptian and Israeli blockade of Gaza, established in response to Hamas rocket fire, has certainly diminished the quality of life of Palestinians. But Palestinians in Gaza — especially pre-October 7 — very much could leave the Strip if they had the means and proper paperwork, as is the case for most people around the world. Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were cut off from the outside world, leaving the walls of the ghetto only to perform forced labor. Israel has not enslaved Gazans; in fact, right before October 7, Israel significantly increased work permits for Gazans into Israel.
The wealth distribution in Gaza was unfair, but there were at least 600 millionaires living there. There were luxury malls, hotels, homes, and more. No such things existed in the Warsaw Ghetto. Sick children in Gaza could be brought to Israel for treatment. Nothing of the sort happened in the Warsaw Ghetto. The list goes on and on.
There were no aid trucks going into Nazi concentration camps. Non-Jewish prisoners could sometimes receive aid packages, but no such thing existed for Jews.
German civilians did, however, fully participate in the brutalization of the Jewish people. So did civilians from virtually every other country in Nazi-occupied Europe. Civilians either participated in or instigated a number of Holocaust-era pogroms, including Kristallnacht, the Jedwabne pogrom, the Lviv pogroms, and more.
The Israelis blocking and destroying aid are a small number of extremists. Some are also hostage families who are angered that aid is going into Gaza while their loved ones are not coming out. I do not support their behavior in any way; however, the percentage of Germans that brutalized Jews was exponentially higher than the 400 or so members of Tzav 9, the group destroying aid. Some have been arrested. On the other hand, civilians brutalized Jews with the enthusiastic backing of the Nazis. Between 1945-1949, even after Germany lost the war, public opinion polls found that 37% of Germans supported the extermination of Jews.
First, it’s an outrageous and offensive distortion of history to equate civilians in Nazi-occupied territories who hid Jews to save their lives to Palestinians who are keeping Jews hostage to torture them physically, psychologically, verbally, and sexually. The Righteous Gentiles who hid Jews during World War II did so in defiance of the Nazis and their collaborators; the Palestinians who are keeping hostages right now are doing so so that the governing entity of the Gaza Strip, Hamas, can use them as a bargaining chip.
Families who were caught hiding Jews in Nazi-occupied territories were imprisoned, tortured, and killed. In September 5, 1942, the Nazis announced that those caught aiding Jews in Warsaw would face the death penalty.
The Nazis were certainly not above bombing anyone. For eight months between 1940 and 1941, they bombed the United Kingdom in a campaign known as “The Blitz,” which killed around 43,000 civilians, injured as many as 139,000, and destroyed two million homes. Unsurprisingly, among the many propaganda themes that the Nazis employed against the British was the (false) claim that the British were helping the Jews against the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, and that they were subjecting Arabs to human rights abuses.
No. The meaning of the Nazi Hakenkreuz (“swastika”) has never changed. Antisemites say this to themselves to make themselves feel better about spray painting swastikas on synagogues or replacing the Star of David in the Israeli flag with a swastika. A swastika is never a “condemnation of genocide.” The Nazi swastika is a symbol that represents the extermination of six million Jews.
If these people were genuinely protesting genocide, there’s plenty of other things they can do that do not include defacing a Jewish place of worship with a symbol that evokes memories of the darkest, most brutal period in Jewish history.
The fact is that people of all kinds — from the far-left, to the far-right, to neo-Nazis, to white supremacists, to Islamists — have been defacing Jewish properties with swastikas in supposed condemnation of Israel long before October 7.
You are not condemning someone else’s genocide. You are alluding to ours. And that’s very much intentional, whether you admit that to yourself or not.
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